OUR POSITION STATEMENT

The people and places we come from are not innocent.

This consideration of our own roots speaks broadly and specifically to our position in the world; it is not exhaustive and will change. We place it here to begin to become accountable for our position and to make the power relations perceptible that make our worlds.

We believe this is especially important because the people and places we come from are not innocent. Not only do we speak about our privileges. We also speak about the limitations of our position and our perspective

When you look at us, we have privileges - and we benefit from speaking on the oppression of nurses while we are living a relatively comfortable life in higher education context. You percieve that we are embodying and living colonial realities that are very much alive with us.

​

Some of us immigrated. Others were forced to relocate. Some of our ancestors fought in the second world war (mind you, on the bad side) - should we then call ourselves colonizers and genociders? Some of us have histories that mingle with the histories of the sons and daughters of the American Revolution and the Confederacy.

​

We don't hold particular faiths, consider us as atheists or agnostic. But we understand that religious and secular beliefs are still grown into us.

We are all abled though some of us struggle with chronic mental illness.

​

We hold nationalities that enable us to travel globally with few restrictions, moving with the benefit of the doubt.

For now. 

There is political unrest in many places around the world with rights being revoked rather than expanded.

We are American, British, Canadian, and German and all have access to the English language.

We are all educational climbers and consider ourselves as middle class. We are embedded in higher education. We are all nurses situated in various parts of the healthcare industrial complex.

We are researching and passionate about the philosophies that inform and constitute nursing. We work with theories of new materialism and critical posthumanism.

​

As academics we understand ourselves more as a collective than individuals. Rather than survival of the fittest, we lean in to community and practice survival of the most collaborative.

​

But we also want to acknowledge that we never had to fight for survival and we have a life of relative abundance. 

We are collective - rather than individual - because we understand that embeddedness is vital for change.